Sunday, 1 January 2012

.The dry tone and rich supple vigorous style keep me immersed in reading the Oku-no-hosomichi, sometimes arising and clapping or lying down, stirred to the core. Once had my raincoat on, eager to go on a like journey, and then again content to sit imagining those rare sights. What a hoard of feelings, Kojin jewels, has his brush depicted! Such a journey! Such a man! Pity only that he turns wearier and more and more white comes tingeing his brows.

...............written by Soryu.................(early summer...................seventh year of the Genroku).

photograph: Ken Cockburn, 2010

our Epilogue

And so, many months on from the ending, we append our Epilogue, beginning with the last journey

photograph: Luke Allan, 2011

Back when we were planning the route, pairing off the stations one-by-one, Ken said that the last view should be mine, of Lindisfarne, seen from the train south at the end of the last day. So it came to pass.

tea-moon, Alec Finlay, 2011

Thereabouts Luke and I exchanged gifts on the train, and sipped the final tea, a thermos of Keemun Hao Ya.

photograph: Luke Allan, 2011

he gives me marmaladeI give him whiskywe’re both happy

Enough for a final libation.

(AF)

Leavings

‘After an era of drawing maps of the United States my companion took to drawing maps of the world, supporting them by mermaids and making them fly by north-westerly and north-easterly angels, and he wrote original couplets and hid them in hollow trees and under stones. As Shelley made paper boats in the Bay of Naples he made maps and hid them—his pet hobby for a number of days.One verse asked Atlas if he did not find the world heavier since the Treaty of Versailles.“I hope you made a copy of it before hiding it," said I."Oh, no; stray leaves of poetry, rewards for seekers," said he. Celebrated mountaineers have been putting copper boxes with their signatures on the tops of the mountains this year; Vachel has been leaving original poems in the valleys.

From To The World’s End: XVIII. Making Maps of the World

Reluctant to relinquish the enterprise entirely, I sent a few final labels out into the world, to some of the topographies we hadn’t reached. I’ve become accustomed to the experience of others taking the poems on to places I can’t access, so much so that it has almost become an intrinsic, even natural, aspect of the process by which this artwork was made.

(I) Sado, St Kilda

When I heard Kathleen Jamie was off to St Kilda there was the chance to sew those islands together with Basho’s Sado. I sent KJ a wee parcel of poem-labels and she replied:

‘Ah, but Basho has been to St Kilda. I took his Works there on my last visit three years ago, enamoured of the idea that he was taking the North gait in 1685, and Martin Martin was sailing the Isles in 1695. Brothers in wandering. There was a snowy owl on St Kilda then, white of course, it favoured a particular rocky overhang, and would stand there, as I thought, like a priest at the door of a shrine. One label will be cast adrift in the manner of the old St Kilda mail-boats.

And finally the far north-west, which we regretted not reaching. This photograph, taken by Issie MacPhail near Clashmor, also inspired by Fraser Darling, and in proximity to his isle Tanara Mor.

without spikymarram grass

there would be norich machair

poem, AF; photograph, Isobel MacPhail

(AF)

Chonzie's change of circumstances

‘eager to go on a like journey, and then again content to sit imagining those rare sights’

..........– Sora

'shady hosomichi'Alec Finlay, 2011

Last June I moved across the city, north to south, from a hill view to Hill View. I left behind a second-floor vista that stretched from the Easter Road stadium across Arthur’s Seat, Salisbury Crags and Calton Hill all the way round to the castle. Seagulls provided the soundtrack – a nesting pair colonised the roof of the single-storey building opposite, keeping shoatie from the lamposts. At Hill View, ground floor with a small, hedged front garden, if you stood in the front-room bay and peered right you could just glimpse Blackford Hill. I’d been with Lorna for nearly three years, and this was us, and Holly, her nine year-old, moving in together.

The flit was hard work. I’d spent five and a half years in the old flat, initially a bolthole after I separated from Tamsin. I’d gone through a divorce there, found and lost new relationships, and watched my kids work their way through school, making the shift from primary to secondary, from secondary to college. Suitcase in hand, I’d locked its dark green door when I left for Bratislava or Fraserburgh, unlocked it again when I returned from Kirkwall or Berlin.

Even if the flit became woven in to the narrative of The Road North, a re-enactment of Basho leaving behind his hut in Edo, and even if I did feel it was high time to move on, packing boxes and then lugging them down the tenement’s worn stone stairs felt like the loss of a slowly garnered order, more precarious than I had realised.

Hill View’s front-room became study and spare bedroom. We had a sitting/dining room that led out to a wee back garden, and to a narrow unheated kitchen; then there was our room, and Holly’s room. Lorna moved in first, unpacked, made an initial order, which my arrival unbalanced and overloaded.

After that, the first road trip with Eck came as something of a relief. The simplicity of living out of a suitcase, of studying a library of a dozen books and maps, of going for walks. Ever generous, the days unfolded their delights – river-swimming, hill-walking, poeming outdoors – Basho and Sora prompting us all the while from the wings, encouraging us to speak and act beyond what we might have done alone, nudging us towards ginko, 'walking to write poems'.

I extended the summer travels with a solo trip to Stornoway, and a week in Krakow with Lorna and members of Zielony Balonik, a Polish book group based in Edinburgh, so it wasn’t until November that I spent much time at Hill View. By that time Lorna, who too had had her own place before the flit, was used to having it to herself, and we found that the house was smaller and colder than we had imagined back in spring. A year, I thought, I have to give this at least a year. Snow fell early and, unusually, stayed. The summer journeys seemed to disappear over the horizon, especially after the last blog (and I kept putting it off) was written.

We had a difficult week when Judith, my sister, who lives in Killin, came to stay. She was beginning a course of chemotherapy at the Western General, for a brain tumour diagnosed in those early days on the road. The street is a bus-route, so the snow-ploughs had cleared it, pushing snow against the parked cars, where it refroze; extricating the car from compacted snow was a real struggle. One day it became a community effort, neighbours and the bus-stop queue all mucking in. But somehow, slowly, we made it there and made it back, one day after another, and at the end of the week I drove her back to Killin, on a day when the roads were clear.

My daughter Isobel lives with her mother on the north side of town. Coming to the hill view was an easy bus trip, or a walk from school. She’d been used to coming with me to visit Lorna in her old flat not far from Hill View, so the journey was familiar to her. But it was a long bus trip plus a walk, and I missed her dropping by as and when, for lunch before Friday afternoon drama, or after Saturday morning hockey. I missed just sitting companionably with her, playing gin rummy or watching Neighbours.

I still had that notional year in my head, but day-to-day the difficulties mounted. We wanted different things, needed to live our lives in different ways. Should I stay or should I go? asked The Clash, and as neither of us could say, stay, come February I was ringing the letting agencies. The month between putting down a deposit and flitting was an odd interlude, theory without practice. April came, and it was time to take the books down from the shelves, box and pack them in the hire-van. Angus helped me shift them across town, south to north, and ground floor to ground floor made things easier. We even got lucky with the roadworks – the No Parking notices were up but the works hadn’t begun, so we were able to park by the stair door.

That first evening as darkness fell I sat among the boxes, wondering if I’d done the right thing. The windows framed a back-green enclosed by an uncultivated slope. Angus and his kids came round after swimming, Isobel visited the next morning, Lorna and Holly on Sunday. I enjoyed hosting them, and soon it started to build its own history, develop its own style, reveal its character. The Garden Flat. Beyond the nearby supermarket I explored the cycle path, the park, the riverside scenic route, discovered the second-hand furniture store, the wifi cafés, the Egyptian frieze, the slug-like vintage Peugot.

Isobel comes for Saturday brunch, Lorna relaxes on the sofa, Eck stays over en route to the far north, Holly likes the rocking chair, I sit out in the back-green with Angus while he smokes. It’s not a warm flat, and I can’t see myself wintering here, but it’s home for now.

The transition mirrors that of Judith, who has been through a difficult separation and move. Last summer, from her own Hillview, she overlooked Loch Tay, while this she sees no further than the finches feeding in her garden. She’s down in the village, in amongst it all, near the shops and the hotel. When Eck and I made our final road-trip last month we ate with her and her kids in her new dining-room. She’s been to stay at the Garden Flat, and we spent a warm afternoon in the nearby Botanics, strolling in the Chinese garden, feeling the waterfall’s coolness, sitting in pleasant shade.

These past days I’ve been recalling this same week a year ago, when we made our first road trip, which feels much closer again. Day by day… Acharn, Aberfeldy, Bruar, Glen Lyon, Schiehallion, Sma’ Glen, Dunira, Dundurn, Dalchonzie, Dunkeld… I’ve strong memories of the Schiehallion climb, but what I’d forgotten until now was the rest of that day – the Croft Moraig stone circle, lunch at the Watermill, a walk uphill to St David’s Well, a swim in the Tay. As I write, a year ago we were breakfasting and packing the car at Margaret and Gonzalo’s house at Dunira, just starting to realise that renga and QR weren’t the way forward, our eyes and our minds opened and tuned by our encounters and by a new practice.

Here the windows overlook a neat back green of shrubs and clothes lines, extended by a wild embankment of nettles, bramble and elder, home to foxes who emerge at twilight, canny adults and playful cubs. During the day the garden’s animated by blackbirds, thrushes, doves and grey squirrels. The seagulls keep their distance.

Edinburgh, June 2011

(KC)

Eck's Inverianvie

The memories I want to share are here.pulling my legsalong with my eyesdrawing a straight line

in-between grey-clitched bouldersand tarry puddles

walk on, walk onwhen your bootsget bent

walk on, walk onto the white noiseof the waterfall

walk on, walk onwith a dreamof the lochan

walk on, walk onas far as the name-lost glen

walk on, walk onkist beneath Carnan Lochain Dubh

walk on, walk onsensing skylineafter skyline

walk on, walk onanticipating everybend of the river

walk on, walk onthis far, this closeto the water

walk on, walk onpart way up Inverianvieor part-way down

walk on, walk onwherever we are nowI can go no further

looking backdown the pathto the sea

letting go the lochI pour the teathinking of dearTom

still giving illuminationas language flickeredand dimmed

poetry is still beautiful

taking me with it

quiet but still something

ground, river and sea

my body my tree

after that it becomes

simply the world

accepting the mountainswill remain maybealways too high

reeling in the gripof fatigueI nod to the 2 climbers

as they passheaded outsullen with exhaustion

been in far?four days

I’m too shy to askwhat did you seehow bad was the weather?

now I’ve to findmy way out this glenback by the waterfall

leaving my wishes towalk on, walk onover the next rise

walk on, walk onaround that next bendto Loch a Mhadaidh Mor

descent from Inverianvie

there will always besome distancesI can only imagine

so I follow the pathof what’s realseeing how the world

around ushas begun to lookas it really is

allowing new thoughtsto flourish in the vergescatch on briars

slip into dirty ditchesknowing how the pathfrom making

to acceptingalways has to beginwith making

I wind a few wordsround the stalksof plaited bog-grasses

and green rusheshooking the knotover the spike

pulling the bow tighton the seed-headtake aim with the camera

Counterpane

I take a long lookback at rocky wastesand tussocky pathsfrom Pillow Hill

so long a strangerstruggling withthe stinging lacticthat shadowed

so many walksI’ve found otherways to wanderin the wilds

other ways to bewhere Suzanne saidI could never belongsharing the warmth

Our strapping young fellow who looked like he could take care of himself, with curved short-sword at hip and oaken staff in hand is Claudia Zeiske, who we’d choose to guide us if we were in the deep forest darkness atop a lofty peak

On a light Thursday evening we walked down to The Empty Shop in the heart of Huntly to give a show-and-tell on The Road North for a warm-hearted audience of about two dozen people. Sat in armchairs, Jackanory-style, it’s always pleasing to talk to an audience with many ages. Some old pals – Angus Dunn has come down after finishing his fence – and new ones – Mary Bourne who Ken’s been working with in Dufftown.

And there’s the current Huntly team: Anna, Anthony (met briefly earlier as he was shepherding a group on teenagers on Jacqui’s rickety bikes at the start of his Get Lost session, when the aim was to end up… somewhere), Norma, Gayle, Eric and Amy from Canada.

We read our beginning poem that describes our first forays from Edo, and dip in and out of verses that wander along the way, sensing those little nods of appreciation as someone recognizes a loved glen, beach or ridge, then flip through some photos, holiday-snap style.

We're asked about what we’ve learned, if we were influenced by any other British poets, why we choose remote places, why we’d (till now) missed out this north-east corner of the country. We tell of our aims, to seek out artists and creative communities along the way, people based outside the cities – Kevin Henderson, Ruth MacDougall, Andy MacKinnon, Alistair Peebles, Pat, Andy & Kirsty Law, Eddie Stiven, Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead, The Administrator, Alexander Maris, Jayne Wilding, Edna Whyte, Jen Hadfield, Beka and Nickolai Globe – and small institutions, each defined by the folk that run them, such as HICA, Cairn Gallery, Taigh Chearsabhagh, Atlas, Brae Projects, Outlandia, and here, Deveron Arts, mapping their philosophies and common experiences.

Always there is that common factor, which we share, that the journey to a place is intrinsic to the experience in and of a place.

32 Anthony Schrag, Huntly CastleAlec Finlay, 2011

Under Claudia’s guidance, Huntly’s become the author of a forthright and confident narrative, one that she defines, which is extended and refined by everyone who visits. On our tour we have visited structures which were spaces in which people can meet and share, such as Neil Bromwich & Zoe Walker’s conch, or London Fieldworks & Malcolm Fraser’s hut at Outlandia, but here the architecture in which art pulses is the town itself. Claudia’s emphasis is on social roles, and among the Huntly art-clan there is a ‘shadow-curator’, to argufy with her in periodic reviews.

at their reviewthe single criticismClaudia had

was that B—did not criticizeher enough

Call it ‘socially engaged practice’, toun-art, Beuysianism, or a position akin to community art; each term suggests an era, position, stratification, but the terms never make a static geology. Enough to say, in Huntly art is about artists, people and the effect they have on other people. And the folk we are most interested in are the practitioners themselves, for all but Claudia are visitors here, and we want to see what their stay means to them. Some make it home, as Anna has.

32 Portrait (Anna)(‘fresh from gardening / in her fancy dress and hat / Anna and I agree / her rough hands are true’, AF)Alec Finlay, 2011

Claudia interrogates us, in her Germanic manner: have we visited peopled places, how have we interacted with communities? What was the social aspect of our project? We understand her desire to compare our relation to community with theirs, to examine and contrast philosophies, but we were travellers for this journey, as Basho was – being passers-by or passers-through, we had not the purchase to erect a scaffold of critical analysis. We observed ‘participative relationships’, but accepted that what these depend on are the old verities of hospitality, which means having a big enough tea thermos. We’ve bent over tables to look at maps together and listen to local advice on the best route; been lent books to get read up on the local; shared rides and invited folk to be part of the rituals that framed each station along the road north.

32 Nadokoro Beech (CHIEF)Alec Finlay, 2011

We meet someone for a walk; we make a little art together, we learn some names and come to a better understanding of the lie of the land. If a poem lasts an hour, fine, if it stays tied on to a branch, fine.

This doesn’t mean we are idlers or that we work in an unengaged way; but, as much as taking Basho’s text, we took his practice as our guide and, through him, for this year-long path we have come to understand that our philosophy is defined by lightness.

Our stops are brief; we leave a few poem-labels fluttering in the breeze; a wordless wish attached to a tree; or a libated dram to strengthen the water-table.

Our faith and discipline lies in the journey itself, which we know that anyone can share, or recompose, in their own way. We are only trying to learn how to see prospects better and respond with immediacy and openness to the here-and-now, connecting the moments we spend here, wherever here is, with the long-gone, the elsewhere, and the other, in those particular ways that literature makes possible.

32 wish, pear, Garden ZeiskeAlec Finlay, 2011

We cannot sketch a town. We don’t set words in stone. Perhaps our brief visit to Huntly can touch a few people, catch the gist of a handful of places – the orchard in Claudia’s garden, Anna staking-out the new beans, the newly planted oak saplings among the waste of Battlefield Hill, the path over the Clashmach – reflecting a brief image of our take on their lives.

32 ClashmachKen Cockburn, 2011

Given Claudia's innate feeling of troublednessthat we did not do it quite her way, these are some portraits of folk we met along our journey.

Folk

(I)

elegy for Martyn Bennett

though the instrument lies broken

Martyn's playing still fillsthe silence of the glen

(II)

elegy for Tom McGrath

at Ash Villapassenger trains are shortgoods trains long

if a blackbirdcomes to join usthat’ll be Tom

(III)

Annie Briggs of Kilmiddlefern

being the musicwhile the music lasts

Clancy’s piping carried her so deep within herself

when he asked her nameAnnie found she was beyond

knowing she even had onebut she knew to say

Willie Clancy, let me sing youa song and I will find I have one.

(IV)

Kevin Henderson

on the bikedid Kevin sayit was space

became time?or timebecame space?

(V)

Jayne with a why

there’s my old palwaiting at the bus-stopher hair touched with frosthumming Corcovado for breakfast

finding words to lighten darknessand, when the tide’s high,showing me the safe paththat leads through the graves

(VI)

Tom Clark

come overhave some tea and cakebut no poetry

(VII)

Alex & Mary

Alex & Maryrenew their octogenarianvow of love

at their yearly campon the summitof Ben Nevis

(VIII)

Annie & Jessie (Berneray)

i.m. Jessie

how many folk were offeredscones, pancake spreadsand strawberry jamwith the lilting refrain

.....very good.....very good

windbent in faded blue macsherding the sheepwith their handbagsshearing them by hand

Annie's place’s not rightfor us to come inbut she'll sit a whilewith us at the door

her hands are shakybut she's still the witto gently teaseEck, are you not married yet?

(IX)

Suzanne Piper: Robespierrist of The Mountains

ethics and geologyaren’t for confusingrock’s rock: ergo inhuman

despite the bitter ragesof those who perceiveunpeopled moors

as the only thingsthat are worthwhiletheir being wild,

their being all thatisn’t us – for alltheir lonely at-one-ment

no peak ever feltsuch an apartheidof the spirit

Mesostic Claudia

32 Portrait (Claudia)Alec Finlay, 2011

And this is our portrait of Claudia as (some of) the mountain’s that she loves.

James Legge, missionary, Sinologist and early translator of the I-Ching – part of the monumental Sacred Books of the East series, intended to encourage mutual understanding between Christians and Chinese – was born in Huntly in 1815.

Legge collaborated with a number of Chinese, including the reforming writer and publisher, Wang Tao, who came to stay with him in Scotland.

In their honour, I consulted the I-Ching, casting a reading for Deveron Arts on my i-Phone. The outlook is good.

XVI. THE YÜ HEXAGRAM

Yü indicates that, (in the state which it implies), feudal princes may be set up, and the hosts put in motion, with advantage.Commentary: The Yü hexagram denoted to king Win a condition of harmony and happy contentment throughout the kingdom, when the people rejoiced in and readily obeyed their sovereign. At such a time his appointments and any military undertakings would be hailed and supported. The fourth line, undivided, is the lord of the figure, and being close to the fifth or place of dignity, is to be looked on as the minister or chief officer of the ruler. The ruler gives to him his confidence; and all represented by the other lines yield their obedience.(II). The second SIX, divided, shows one who is firm as a rock. (He sees a thing) without waiting till it has come to pass; with his firm correctness there will be good fortune.Commentary:Line 2, though weak, is in its correct position, the centre, moreover, of the lower trigram. Quietly and firmly its subject is able to abide in his place, and exercise a far-seeing discrimination. All is indicative of good fortune.

tr. James Legge

32 Yu, I-ChingAnna Vermehren, 2011

(AF)

Red Earth, Red Flags

The weather is scorchio. Today was the right day for republicans to be up on the hills. I prefer Gala Day bunting to all these Union Jacks.

32 hokku-label(‘lovely day / for a wedding // better day / for a walk’, AF)photograph by Ken Cockburn, 2011

They’ve upgraded Kate to Catherine and awarded her some extra shield.

3 of the admiral’s oaksturned to gold

ready to be impaledon a divided shield

per pale azure & gules a chevron or

The new Middleton heraldic coat has oaks to represent her family’s purchased home, Bucklebury, Berkshire. The trees are said to have grown from acorns scattered by Admiral Collingwood on his return from Trafalgar, in order that the English Navy would never be short of ship’s timber.

Kate-Catherine’s arms will by now have been ‘impaled’ with those of her new husband, the right-royal yellow-budgie pilot.

32 weddingAlec Finlay, 2011

There’s a Huntly Royal garden party and wedding viewing at Claudia’s, everyone dressed to the nines, some marking their service in the forces, others dolled up with humour.

Here’s another philosophical challenge for Ken and me to think through, whether or not to respect local custom, how to define ritual: our politics is a fondness for shared acts, but we keep pomp at farther than arm’s length.

I’d used the word rite last night, in the chat after our reading, saying I knew it had an air of embarrassment, but no other term would seem to serve. Our rituals are everyday; they became so only through their repetition – as I like to joke, if it happens twice, then to the poet it’s always, as in, we always stop here for tea, we always listen to Jimi Hendrix in Glen Nevis, etc. Most folk have such customs for their journeys.

What we share is the observation – seeing, sharing, recording – a willingness to mark certain intersections to folk, time and place. Rites in stone place holy buildings at the intersection of two rivers. Apples are found in an orchard, alders by a river, rowan at the gate, each with a wish tied on its branches.

32 wish rowanKen Cockburn, 2011

Our rituals are pocket-sized; a spring or burn, libated with whisky.

(AF)

Walking

32 CoynachieKen Cockburn, 2011

We’re staying out of town, at Coynachie. Next morning, after his fine bath, Claudia drives Eck back into Huntly for his tour of the toun.

The anxiety to avoid fields with cattle, especially those with calves, leads to detours, scrambles and legs hoisted gingerly over barbed wire.

32 The ClashmachKen Cockburn, 2011

It’s hard to pick out Clashmach among the other hills until close to. The weather is fine, and when at the top of the Clashmach I take off my rucksack to find myself drenched in cold sweat it’s heat rather than terror-induced.

I meet no-one until nearly back in Huntly – a couple I, slightly startled, hear before I see, on a bench just up from the Mart’s road-end. Walking through town, I see next to nobody – a few cars round Asda, but the playpark’s deserted. Perhaps they’re all inside watching tv? But outside the only nod towards the wedding is a house flying a pair of Union Jacks; if the rest of town has monarchist sympathies, it’s not making a fuss about it.

We set out mid-May last year, so later than this: it’s good to catch up with the blossoms and wildflowers we missed.

32 Compassing HuntlyAlec Finlay, 2011

(KC)

Deveron Arts HQ

32 wish, appleAlec Finlay, 2011

For Eck first stop is Deveron Arts HQ, from where he sent this report. The morning tasks have been divvied up. While Anna’s fetches out the beans for planting I tie a wish in the apple. Different yields.

Then Anthony – Schrag, who is in residence – takes me up to Huntly Castle, one of the many Gordon strongholds that have stood or fallen hereabouts.

32 hokku-label(‘trees / out-/ last / walls’, AF)Alec Finlay, 2011

Pat, the keeper of the ruin, happens to be dowsing, so we chat about that. She’d no idea that she had the knack with a diviner until her son started. It seems to be a divinatory place this, in the tradition of Legge.

Then, post-wedding, I’m passed on like a parcel, from Antony to Norma, and now it’s time to climb the hill named after no-one seems quite sure what battle. When the nation’s ruined it only leads to more ruin. The plantation woods up here were supposed to be thinned 30 years ago, and 15 years ago, but those jobs got forgot, until now, when the council’s need of cash led to a savage clear-cutting. Many folk would see the scene as one of utter waste, with scarred ground and heaped grey branches, dusty brown soil scored with tyre tracks and only few bare trunks standing, reminiscent of Ypres or Paschendale. It takes years for a forest to right itself after an industrial felling like this.

Basho, Battlefield HillNorma Hunter, 2011

Claudia feels the loss so keenly she hasn’t yet felt ready to survey the scene. I would have reacted the same, but Norma guides me to look farther, for she sees things differently. She’s helped create a new planting in amongst the ruin –5,000 natives, spiraling over the plateau. Best of all, she invited two of the original planters to help replace sitka with oak. It is Norma who hears more birdsong, sees the deer more often, so I learn to listen.

As we walk through the ex-wood-&-woodland-to-be, Norma says she’d like there to be a tower up here, and I suggest it should go somewhere near the old dun, to pick out the prospect of the toun which has come clear again, freed from the thick screen of sitka branches.

After I get back home I sketched out an idea for a viewing platform, much in the style of a ladder stile, and sent it to Claudia & Norma. It adopts Norma’s wish for a place to look-out-from – always something that was done from this hill – and adds the idea of a xylotheque (a library of wooden books), to archive the wood past and wood future.

I envisage a series of wood samples, one for each native species that populated these isles after the glaciers receded. The trees would be set in order, one per step, so that as folk ascend the ladder to the platform they are walking through the vastness of ecological time. A healing for the clear-cutting, which is such an unnatural way to manage a wood and, best of all, someday the view from the top of the platform will, once again, be engulfed by the trees.

I found it amusing that Claudia didn’t like this idea, because, as she explained, it was not Deveron Arts enough, being not for, or about, people. It seemed to me that a stile-platform was precisely for people, but I knew what she meant – it wasn’t an idea I’d had in the local bakers. Norma and I hope to make it happen someday, and, for Claudia, there is a different idea to work on, with Ken’s help, relating to the muckle sangs.

(AF)

Ballads: Momus

Hereabouts the wives and daughters of rich earls were wooed away from them by black-eyed gypsy-laddies, despised outsider figures who queered the norms of farm life.

A contemporary Japanese twist to this balladeering tradition comes from Momus (Nick Currie), who stands in the same tradition, combining narratives of lust and betrayal with casio bleeps and techy glitches, as in ‘bishonen’. The map that I composed to summarise the road north (here), pairing Basho’s stations with our 53 equivalents, was a nod to Momus own rorsharch vision of Scotland, made with the designer Zak Kyes.Momus gave his blessing and said my map reminded him of another mapwork he had made, which seeds Japanese towns onto Scotland. Funny how persistent this connection of the two cultures is.

(AF)

Hambo Fulton

Hamish Fulton, 2011

The same connection is made, implicitly, in the work of Hamish Fulton – or Hermit Futon, as we like to byname him – who recently published a book with Deveron Arts, documenting his walks here in the toun, and, over many years, up in the Cairngorms.I’ve long admired Hamish’s work. Ken & I have found that our journey has refined the practice of our poetics, embedding words in the immediate experience of being & making, responding to particular places. And so I feel a deep kinship with the recent variations Hamish has made, in counterpoint to his longer walks, such as the slow walks, city walks, backwards walks and communal walks.

(AF)

Another Shirakawa

Continuing the walking theme, we invited Robert Macfarlane to contribute his suggestion as to where that crossing into the wild places, Shirakawa, might be found. In the end Robert choose to place it somewhere between our Perthshire glens and Huntly. Again, he picks up the idea of rites of way.

Dear Eck, Ken,You're making magic with your map. I'm checking back in often, watching the overlaps and the time-slips, while I fashion my own foot-atlas, my old-way-book. Many miles now tramped, many words now to write. Alec, you asked what my Shirawaka Barrier was, the transition or passage-point into a wild place, 'when the heart slips and a breath is exhaled'. Well it's here:

The southern gateway to the Lairig Ghru, the Cairngorm valley where snow lies sintering all year round. The Ghru is winter's fall-back point, its last fastness, the place out of which the cold musters itself again in the early autumn. Around about now, in fact. Entering the Ghru from the south, the sense of crossing a threshold or portal is unmistakable. The gatekeeper peaks­ are Devil’s Point to the west, with its diagonal flashings of scree, and the battleship flank of Carn a’ Mhaim to the east. They stand close, intimidating and sentinel. You must pass between and beneath them, and only then on up to the watershed.I last walked the Lairig Ghru a summer ago, while crossing the Cairngorms from south to north on the way to my grandfather's funeral in Tomintoul. That was a ritual walk, and these were some of the things with which we met in its course – riverbed boulders – bog myrtle – pine-resin – a siskin’s cry – a salmon’s splash – sphagnum – fire on the pass; and these were the types of rock over which we passed – Dalradian limestone, diorite, quartzite, feldspar, granulite, granite, slate, phyolite and mica-schist – and of these the most durable is granite.Yrs,Robert

(Robert Macfarlane)

Garden Zeiske

After the wedding, dresses back on their hangers, Clan Zeiske are off to Skye for some more Munros. Before they leave neighbour Rae and son Ian look in with a regal strawberry cake, which we wash down (ceremonially) with Glenfiddich, chosen in honour of Claudia, who worked on the residency program there a few years ago.

Car packed, everyone departs, leaving the to poets hang-out in another lovely garden, rich with fruit trees, and do some poeming.

32 hokku-label(‘some of us / have ladders / inside // some of us / have swings / inside’, AF)Ken Cockburn, 2011

This is a selection of our Ballad Headlines, from the proposal for Deveron Arts. The form seems to be a kind of mélange of IHF’s HEADLINE poems of the 1960s, composed from the pages of Fishing News, with a feint echo of Harry Smith’s thematic summations, in his Anthology of American folk-song:

The English artist Ben Jones was shadow curator to Clauzia Zeiske at Huntly for 6 months in 2011. Ben offers some thoughts and photographs taken in and around Huntly, reflecting his impression of the town and community.

As someone who has lived in a city for ten years but was brought up close to fairly rural countyside, it sounds ridiculous, but living in Aberdeenshire, I did feel as if I was in a different country – which I obviously was. A comment that has stuck with me is that in England there are rural areas, but in Scotland there is rural and there is also remote.

English remoteness rarely exists, as you are never that far away from easy access to a city or large town. However, for large swathes of the North of Scotland, towns are far apart, the combination of the rural landscape and the decimated transport system creates a strong sense of remoteness – something that I have never experienced before. This remoteness brings with it a sense of otherness, alterity, so some things that would not usually have any specific interest develop a level of, for want of a better word, exoticism.

ABOUT

the road north (2010-11) is a book-length poem describing a journey through Scotland, composed by Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn as they traveled through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho, whose Oku no hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) is one of the masterpieces of travel literature. Ken & Alec departed Edinburgh on 16 May 2010, the same date that Basho and his companion Sora departed Edo in 1689.

The journey was published as a blog – a collaborative audio & visual word-map – and realised as a book and poem-audio, describing the landscapes they visited and the people they met. For information about the book, visit the Shearsman website. You can download the full poem-audio for free on iTunes.